Tanzania Safaris is a listings site. It gathers safaris sold by independent tour operators into one place so that they can be read side by side, and then it passes enquiries to the company that runs the trip. It is not a tour company itself. It operates no safaris, takes no bookings and handles no money.
It exists because the trips are spread across dozens of separate websites, each describing its itineraries in its own way and its own order. Working out whether a seven-day northern circuit from one company covers the same ground as a seven-day itinerary from another usually means opening a dozen tabs and reading a dozen differently organised pages. Here every trip is set out the same way — where it goes, how many days it runs, what it includes and which company sells it — so the comparison takes minutes. After that the site gets out of the way.
What is on the site
The listings themselves are the centre of it. You can browse the safaris and narrow them by destination, activity or trip length, or start from the company instead and read the operator directory, where each profile carries the trips that company has published.
Alongside the listings there is reference material written here rather than supplied by operators, because a trip is hard to judge without it. The destinations index covers the national parks, the game reserves, the forest reserves, the lakes and mountains, the islands and the coast, and the towns that safaris start and end in — each one a guide to the place, with the individual sights inside it written up underneath. Things to Do in Tanzania approaches the same country from the other direction, by what you would actually be doing: the migration, a walking safari, a Kilimanjaro route, diving off Mafia, a spice farm, a rock-art site. Plan Your Safari holds the longer guides to the decisions that shape a trip before any of that matters.
How an enquiry works
Open a safari that interests you and use the Enquire button on that page. The message goes to the operator selling that trip, with the itinerary and your details attached. They reply to you directly with dates, availability and a quote, and they are the ones who take the booking and run the safari. Nothing is reserved or paid for on this site, and nobody here answers on an operator’s behalf.
Because the enquiry goes straight to the company, there is no one sitting between the two of you at any point: not while the quote is being written, not while you are asking for the itinerary to be changed, and not while you are on the trip. Plan Your Safari sets out what to put in a first enquiry so the reply comes back with real dates and a real price rather than a brochure.
What it costs you
Nothing. There is no fee, no membership and no booking charge for travellers, and no payment of any kind passes through this site. Whatever an operator quotes you is that operator’s own price. Nothing is added to it here, because there is nothing here for it to be added to.
How a company gets listed
A tour operator signs up through List Your Safaris, fills in a company profile and writes its own itineraries in an operator dashboard. Listings do not appear the moment they are submitted: a new profile, and each new safari, waits in a review queue until somebody here publishes it. Until that happens the profile is not public and the company’s safaris stay as drafts.
Everything that matters about the trip stays with the operator. It writes the itinerary, sets the price, decides what is included, quotes the traveller, takes the booking and runs the safari. This site carries the listing and forwards the enquiry, and that is the whole of its part in it.
What being listed does not mean
This is worth being exact about, because travel sites tend to be vague here. The review a listing passes through is a check on the listing. It is not an inspection of the company behind it.
This site does not audit an operator’s licence, insurance, vehicles, guides, accounts or safety record, and it does not hold the records that would let it. Being listed is therefore not an endorsement, not a recommendation and not a guarantee of anything, and the order in which safaris appear is not a ranking of quality. Nothing here should be read as a verdict on a company, and nothing here ranks one company above another.
Which means the checks are yours to make, and they are the ones worth making of any operator anywhere.
- Ask what the company is registered as and where, and ask for the licence number it trades under.
- Ask who will actually operate the trip on the ground in Tanzania — the company you are writing to, or a partner it works through — and, if it is a partner, ask the same questions about them.
- Ask who your guide will be, what their qualification is, and what vehicle you will be in.
- Ask for park and conservation fees to be itemised. Entry to the national parks is set by Tanzania National Parks and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area sets its own charges, and a Kilimanjaro or Meru climb carries a separate park permit. Most quotes fold all of that in, but you want to see which lines are the authority’s and which are the operator’s.
- Ask what happens to your deposit between paying it and travelling, and what the cancellation terms are in writing.
- Ask what insurance the company carries, and take out your own as well.
- Ask for references from travellers who went recently, and for the company’s own street address and a landline.
A company worth booking answers all of that without going quiet, and the answers are usually what separates two quotes that looked identical.
What this site is not
- Not a tour operator. It has no vehicles, no permits and no guides of its own, and it neither sells nor leads safaris.
- Not a booking engine. Nothing is reserved here, no availability is held here, and no card is ever taken here.
- Not a review site. There are no ratings, scores or traveller reviews on it. Where an operator’s profile links out to a review page, that is the operator’s own link to its own listing somewhere else, not a score awarded here.
- Not an agent. It does not negotiate, quote or hold money for a traveller, and it takes no side in anything agreed between a traveller and an operator.
Who it is for
For travellers, the site earns its place at the point where you roughly know what you want — the migration and a few days on the coast, say, in ten days in July — and need to see who sells that and how their versions of it differ. If you have not decided any of that yet, the planning guides are the better place to begin; the comparison is far more useful once the month and the length are settled.
For tour operators, the reason to list is reach. A traveller comparing Tanzania trips sees your safaris next to everyone else’s, and the enquiries that follow land in your inbox rather than an intermediary’s.
Where to start
- If you know the park or the region, begin at the destination guides and follow the safaris linked from the place you have chosen.
- If you know the experience — the migration, a mountain, chimpanzees, diving, a cultural visit — begin at things to do.
- If you know your dates and how long you have, go straight to the safari listings and narrow them by length.
- If none of that is settled, work through Plan Your Safari first.
Telling us something is wrong
A question about a particular safari should go to the operator selling it, through the Enquire button on that safari’s page. That is the fastest route to an answer and the only route to a quote. For anything about the site itself — a listing that is wrong or out of date, an enquiry that went unanswered, an error in one of the guides, or a company that would like to be listed — use the contact page. Corrections about a park fee, a permit rule, a ferry timetable or a road are particularly welcome: those details change, and a page that has quietly gone stale is worse than no page at all.
The terms and conditions set all of this out formally, for travellers and for operators.